JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  This situation created a deadly, low-level, self-perpetuating turmoil. Diem’s fragile new country was falling apart in the most unlikely of places—in the regions that had always had the most prosperous farms and in the zones farthest from Hanoi. Unrest spread through the most fertile, most stable, and most wealthy regions of the new State of Vietnam. Back in Saigon, the Diem government and its American advisers were totally unaware of the true causes of this unrest, but they were ready with their Pavlovian interpretation. It was, they said, the result of “Communist subversion and insurgency.” Chronologically, this situation began to be identified and studied by the Americans at just the time that Kennedy became President. The concept of “counterinsurgency” had been heard in the Pentagon before the end of the Eisenhower administration; but it came into full flower with the arrival of the Kennedy administration.

  The Americans’ only embarrassment, if they considered it at all, was that the most serious rioting was taking place in the southernmost regions of the State of Vietnam, those areas farthest from any appreciable “Communist” infiltration. The Diem government and its American advisers had created the causes of the rioting, but they wanted the rest of the world to believe otherwise. They had much bigger things in mind.

  With no system of law and order to replace that used by the French, with no organized means of merchandising to replace that of the Chinese, and with no need for taxes because of the easy access to free-flowing American dollars, the Diem government was not close to the citizenry and had no idea what to do about the rioting, banditry, and boiling unrest. It turned to its American advisers for aid.

  Meanwhile, all over South Vietnam, the rioting spread. The rice-producing villagers raced everywhere in a crazed search for essential necessities. They overran other communities—rubber plantations, fishing villages, lumber villages, etc.—in fierce, uncontrollable local battles.

  All of this was seriously amplified by a different kind of trouble caused by the influx of the one million strangers from the north. These invaders needed the same things as their hosts: the basic necessities of life. They had left their homeland and found themselves in a new land that was seething with unrest.

  To the recently arrived American advisers, such as those in Secretary McNamara’s “Combat Development Test Centers,” a quick-fix concept designed to correct such problems, the American perception of this conflagration was clear: This rioting and insurgency must be the work of the Communists. The Communists, they reported, had infiltrated the refugees and now were linking up with an underground fifth column of natives to create havoc and to embarrass the new Diem government in Saigon.

  “Communist-led subversive insurgency” became the buzzwords, and in the United States “counterinsurgency” became the answer. The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission and its undercover terrorism and propaganda campaigns were paying off splendidly for the creators of the Cold War. All of Indochina had been prepared for war by them and their undercover activities, and the American armed forces were coming. By the time the American troops arrived, South Vietnam would be seething with an identifiable “enemy.” This had been the objective of those who’d ordered the movement of the 1,100,000 Tonkinese natives in the first place.

  During this period, as in the late 1950s and the closing years of the Eisenhower administration, the general perception was that the fighting in Laos was actually much more serious than the rising problems in Vietnam. The CIA and its U.S. Armed Forces “Special Forces” allies were playing a monumental role, behind the scenes, in Laos, Burma, and Thailand. This was kept quite distinct from their activity in Vietnam.

  In late 1960, when the departing President, Dwight Eisenhower, met with his successor, John F. Kennedy, he told him that the biggest trouble spot would be in Laos and that with Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon, he had little to worry about there. U.S. participation in Laos is another story, but one factor of the fighting in Laos did have a most significant impact upon the escalation of the war in South Vietnam: It began the evolution of an entirely new set of tactical characteristics of that warfare.

  A full squadron of U.S. Marine Corps helicopters had been secretly transferred, at the request of the CIA, from Okinawa to Udorn, Thailand, just across the river from Laos. The helicopters that saw combat in Laos were based and maintained in Thailand by U.S. Marines. These military men did not leave Thailand; the helicopters were flown to the combat zones of Laos by CIA mercenary pilots of the CAT Airlines organization, under the operational control of the CIA.

  In those days, in accordance with the provisions of National Security Council Directive #5412, every effort had been made to keep U.S. military and other covert assistance at a level that could be “plausibly” disclaimed. The theory was that if these operations were compromised in any way, the U.S. government should be able to “disclaim plausibly” its role in the action. In other words, these helicopters had been “sterilized.” There were no U.S. Marine Corps insignia on them, there were no marine serial numbers, no marine paperwork, no marine pilots. This was at best a thin veneer; but the veneer was needed to make it possible to use the marine equipment.

  Back in Saigon, CIA operators wanted those helicopters transferred to Vietnam. Many of the CIA agents who had been infiltrated into South Vietnam, contrary to the provisions of the Geneva Agreements, had been moved there secretly from Laos. While in Laos they had become accustomed to the use and convenience of this large force of combat helicopters. They wanted them in Vietnam, where they proposed to use them to transport South Vietnamese army troops to fight the fast-growing numbers of “enemy” who were rioting for food and water in the rice-growing areas of the Camau Peninsula. This helicopter movement was planned to be the CIA’s first operational combat activity of the Vietnam War. It turned out to also be the first step of a decade of escalation of that war.

  At that time, all American military aid to South Vietnam was strictly limited by the “one for one” replacement stipulation of the 1954 Geneva Agreements. The CIA could not move a squadron of military helicopters into South Vietnam, because there were no helicopters there to replace. So movement of those helicopters from Laos would have to be a covert operation. Any covert operation could be initiated and maintained only in accordance with a specific directive from the National Security Council and with the cooperation and direct assistance of the Department of Defense.

  The CIA’s first attempt to have these helicopters moved for combat purposes came in mid-1960 and was an attempt to beat the system. Gen. Charles P. Cabell, the deputy director of central intelligence, called one of his contacts (who happened to be this author) in the Office of Special Operations (OSO), a division of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), to see if these helicopters could be moved to Vietnam quickly and quietly, on an emergency basis, because of the outbreak of rioting all over the country.

  In those days, the Office of Special Operations followed the policy set forth by Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates, which closely followed the language of the law, that is, the National Security Act of 1947. The pertinent language of that act states that the CIA operates “under the direction2 of the NSC.”

  At the time of General Cabell’s call, OSO had received no authorization for such a move, and the request was denied on the ground that such a move would be covert and that the NSC had not directed such an operation into Vietnam. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the letter of this law was followed carefully.

  In most cases, the CIA did not possess enough assets in facilities, people, and materiel to carry out the operations it wanted to perform. Therefore, the CIA had to come to the military establishment for support of its clandestine operations. The Defense Department would not provide this support without an agreed-upon NSC directive for each operation and usually without a guarantee of financial reimbursement from the CIA for at least “out-of pocket”costs. This kept the CIA at bay and under reasonable control during these more “normal” years.

  There is an interesting anecdote
from this period that reveals President Eisenhower’s personal concern with clandestine operations. Control of the CIA has never been easy. During the early part of Eisenhower’s first term, the NSC approved a directive—NSC 10/2—that governed the policy for the development and operation of clandestine activity. The NSC did not want covert operations to be the responsibility of the military. It said, quite properly, that the military’s role was a wartime, not a peacetime, one. Therefore, such operations, when directed, would be assigned to the CIA. At the same time, it had long been realized that the CIA did not have adequate resources to carry out such operations by itself and that it was better that it didn’t.

  Thus, the NSC ruled that when such operations had been directed, the CIA would turn to the Defense Department, and when necessary, to other departments or agencies of the government, for support.

  Sometimes the support provided was considerable. President Eisenhower was quite disturbed by this policy. He saw that it would create, within the organization of the CIA, a surrogate military organization designed to carry out military-type covert operations in peacetime. It would follow, he thought, that the CIA might, over the years, become a very large, uncontrollable military force in itself. He could not condone that, and he acted to curb such a trend.

  President Eisenhower had written in the margin of the first page of the NSC 10/2 directive, on the copy that had been sent to the Defense Department: “At no time will the CIA be provided with more equipment, etc., than is absolutely necessary for the support of the operation directed and such support provided will always be limited to the requirements of that single operation.”

  This stipulation by the President worked rather well as long as the Office of the Secretary of Defense enforced it strictly. Later, certain elements of the military turned this directive around and began to use the CIA as a vehicle for doing things they wanted to do—as with the Special Forces of the U.S. Army—but could not do, because of policy, during peacetime.

  This situation was confronted seriously by President Kennedy immediately following the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961.3

  By the early 1950s, former President Harry S. Truman was saying that when he signed the CIA legislation into law, he made the biggest mistake of his presidency. In those same years, President Eisenhower had similar thoughts, and he did everything he could to place reasonable controls on the agency. Both of these men feared the CIA because of its power to operate in secrecy and without proper accountability.

  During the Eisenhower administration, the Defense Department was usually scrupulous about this note penned on NSC 10/2 by the President and was careful to limit support to that needed for the current operation. The result was that there was always close cooperation and collaboration between the agency and the Defense Department on most clandestine operations. In other words, the clandestine operations carried out during that period were usually what might be called joint operations, with the CIA being given operational control. This applied to the development of all “military” activities in Vietnam, at least until the marines landed there in March 1965.

  This NSC policy applied to that request for helicopters from General Cabell of the CIA and accounts for the fact that his original request was vetoed by the Defense Department. This veto required the CIA to prepare its case more formally and to go first to the NSC with its request for the helicopters. In those days, the NSC had a subcommittee, the “5412/2 Committee,” or “Special Group,” that handled covert activities. This group consisted of the deputy undersecretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense, the President’s special assistant for national security affairs, and the director of central intelligence, the latter serving as the group’s “action officer.” In 1957, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff also became a member. Approval for these helicopters was eventually obtained from this Special Group, and the secretary of defense authorized the Office of Special Operations to make all arrangements necessary with the Marine Corps to move the aircraft to Vietnam—secretly—from Udorn, Thailand, to an area south of Saigon near Camau.4

  Perhaps more than any other single action of that period, this movement of a large combat-ready force in 1960 marked the beginning of the true military escalation of the war in Vietnam. From that time on, each new action under CIA operational control moved America one step closer to intervention with U.S. military units under U.S. military commanders.

  By 1960—61, the CIA had become a surrogate U.S. military force, complete with the authority to develop and wage warfare during peacetime.5

  In the process, the CIA was fleshed out with U.S. military personnel who had been “sheep-dipped”6 to make it appear that only civilians were involved. This process was to have a detrimental impact upon the implementation of the Vietnam War: It put CIA civilian officials in actual command of all operational forces in the fast-growing conflict, at least until 1965. As an additional factor, the concealment of military personnel in the CIA led to many of the problems that the armed forces would later delegate to the League of Families of Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia.

  By the time this policy giving the CIA “operational” control over all American pseudomilitary units in Vietnam was changed, the “strategy” of warfare in Southeast Asia had become so stereotyped that such true military commanders as Generals Westmoreland and Abrams found little room to maneuver. They were required to take over a “no-win,” impossible situation without a military objective, except that of the overriding Grand Strategy of the Cold War: that is, to make war wherever possible, to keep it going, to avoid the use of H-bombs, and to remember Malthus’s and Darwin’s lessons that the fittest will survive.

  Therefore, when the NSC directed a move of helicopters to Vietnam, it ordered the Marine Corps unit at Udorn to be returned, with its own helicopters, to Okinawa. New helicopters of the same type were transported from the United States—meaning, of course, that new procurement orders of considerable value were placed with the helicopter-manufacturing industry, a business that was almost bankrupt at the time.

  At the same time, the CIA had to put together a large civilian helicopter unit, much larger than the original Marine Corps unit, with maintenance and flight crews who were for the most part former military personnel who had left the service to take a job at higher pay and a guarantee of direct return to their parent service without loss of seniority. This meant that overseas, combat wage scales were paid to everyone in the unit, at a cost many times that of the military unit it replaced.

  As soon as the helicopters arrived and were made ready for operational activities, the CIA’s “army” began training with elite troops of the new South Vietnamese army. They were being hurried into service against those villages where the most serious “refugee-induced” rioting was under way. This operation opened an entirely new chapter of the thirty years of war in Vietnam.

  Now who was the enemy? When CIA helicopters, loaded with heavily armed Vietnamese soldiers, were dispatched against “targets” in South Vietnam, who could they identify as “enemy”? It was during this period that we heard the oft-repeated reply “Anyone who runs away when we come must be the enemy.”

  With the passage of time and with the incitement of low-level warfare in South Vietnam while this helicopter campaign was being prepared, the “enemy” was more and more the native population of the villages of southern Vietnam. They were indeed fighting; but they had been forced to fight to defend their homes, their food, and their way of life against the starving refugees from the north. The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission had proved its “make war” prowess. In that mixing bowl of banditry, everyone was the “insurgent,” everyone was the enemy. Additionally, Diem’s two edicts driving out the French and the Chinese exacerbated the problem across the land. As things developed, many of Diem’s newest and finest troops were members of that one-million-strong invading force of “Catholic” refugees. They had now become the “friends” of Saigon against the local and native “enemy.”

&n
bsp; As discussed earlier, the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission had arrived in Saigon in 1954. It was now 1960. President Eisenhower was winding down his two-term administration, and the young Senator John F. Kennedy was organizing his own group of friends, relatives, and experts to gain the office of the presidency and to set in motion the historic events of those momentous days of Camelot.

  We have prepared the way for the main focus of this book with a detailed discussion of the origin and activities of the CIA and with a systematized review of the buildup and early escalation of the warfare in Vietnam. These events present a significant view of the Cold War and what challenges the new President would face. Of course, they are far from the whole story. A brief look at a few other CIA-related activities will serve to broaden the scope of the scene in Washington on the threshold of the sixties.

  In May 1960, President Eisenhower had planned to culminate his dream of a “Crusade for Peace” with the ultimate summit conference with Nikita Khrushchev in Paris. On May 1, 1960, a CIA spy plane, a high-flying U-2 with Capt. Francis Gary Powers at the controls, overflew the Soviet Union from Pakistan and made a crash-landing at Sverdlovsk in the heart of Russia and by so doing wrecked the hopes of the summit conference and the dreams of Eisenhower and Khrushchev, two old warriors who understood each other.

  As a footnote to that important event, it was Allen W. Dulles himself, giving testimony before a closed-door session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who said positively that, despite Soviet claims, the Powers U-2 had not been shot down but had descended because of engine trouble. This important statement by Dulles has been little noted by the press, and little thought has been given to exactly why that aircraft had “trouble” at such a critical time.7 Later, Eisenhower confirmed that the spy plane had not been shot down by the Soviets and had indeed lost engine power and crash-landed in Russia. Its unauthorized flight was another part of the Cold War game designed to deny President Eisenhower his Crusade for Peace.